== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 29 2008 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 29 2008 ==

July's commit-fest is starting soon.

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgsnap 0.4 released.
http://pgsnap.projects.postgresql.org/

PL/Proxy 2.0.6 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plproxy/

pyreplica 1.0 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pyreplica/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for June ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2008-06/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

pgDay Portland is July 20, just before OSCON.
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/400

PGCon Brazil 2008 will be on September 26-27 at Unicamp in Campinas.
http://pgcon.postgresql.org.br/index.en.html

PGDay.IT 2008 will be October 17 and 18 in Prato.
http://www.pgday.org/it/

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david@fetter.org, German language
to pwn@pgug.de, Italian language to pwn@itpug.org.

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane committed:

- Fix Gen_fmgrtab.sh to not rely on hard-wired knowledge of the column
  numbers in pg_proc.  Also make it not emit duplicate extern
  declarations, and make it a bit more bulletproof in some other small
  ways.  Likewise fix the equally hard-wired, and utterly
  undocumented, knowledge in the MSVC build scripts.  For testing
  purposes and perhaps other uses in future, pull out that portion of
  the MSVC scripts into a standalone perl script equivalent to
  Gen_fmgrtab.sh, and make it generate actually identical output,
  rather than just more-or-less-the-same output.  Motivated by looking
  at Pavel's variadic function patch.  Whether or not that gets
  accepted, we can be sure that pg_proc's column set will change again
  in the future; it's time to not have to deal with this gotcha.

- Oops, make the MSVC build put fmgroids.h where it needs to be.  Per
  buildfarm results.

- Reduce the alignment requirement of type "name" from int to char,
  and arrange to suppress zero-padding of "name" entries in indexes.
  The alignment change is unlikely to save any space, but it is really
  needed anyway to make the world safe for our widespread practice of
  passing plain old C strings to functions that are declared as taking
  Name.  In the previous coding, the C compiler was entitled to assume
  that a Name pointer was word-aligned; but we were failing to
  guarantee that.  I think the reason we'd not seen failures is that
  usually the only thing that gets done with such a pointer is
  strcmp(), which is hard to optimize in a way that exploits
  word-alignment.  Still, some enterprising compiler guy will probably
  think of a way eventually, or we might change our code in a way that
  exposes more-obvious optimization opportunities.  The padding change
  is accomplished in one-liner fashion by declaring the "name" index
  opclasses to use storage type "cstring" in pg_opclass.h.  Normally
  btree and hash don't allow a nondefault storage type, because they
  don't have any provisions for converting the input datum to another
  type.  However, because name and cstring are effectively the same
  thing except for padding, no conversion is needed --- we only need
  index_form_tuple() to treat the datum as being cstring not name, and
  this is sufficient.  This seems to make for about a one-third
  reduction in the typical sizes of system catalog indexes that
  involve "name" columns, of which we have many.  These two changes
  are only weakly related, but the alignment change makes me feel
  safer that the padding change won't introduce problems, so I'm
  committing them together.

- Modify the recently-added probe for -Wl,--as-needed some more,
  because RHEL-4 vintage Linux is even more broken than we realized: a
  link to libreadline will succeed, and fail only at runtime.  It
  seems that an AC_TRY_RUN test is the only reliable way to check
  whether this is really safe.  Per report from Tatsuo Ishii.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plpgsql.sgml, clarify plpgsql documentation by
  not treating IF THEN ELSE IF ... as a truly distinct version of IF.
  Per suggestion from Marko Kreen.

- Improve planner's estimation of the size of an append relation:
  rather than taking the maximum of any child rel's width, we should
  weight the widths proportionally to the number of rows expected from
  each child.  In hindsight this is obviously correct because row
  width is really a proxy for the total physical size of the relation.
  Per discussion with Scott Carey (bug #4264).

- Consider a clause to be outerjoin_delayed if it references the
  nullable side of any lower outer join, even if it also references
  the non-nullable side and so could not get pushed below the outer
  join anyway.  We need this in case the clause is an OR clause: if it
  doesn't get marked outerjoin_delayed, create_or_index_quals() could
  pull an indexable restriction for the nullable side out of it,
  leading to wrong results as demonstrated by today's bug report from
  toruvinn.  (See added regression test case for an example.) In
  principle this has been wrong for quite a while.  In practice I
  don't think any branch before 8.3 can really show the failure,
  because create_or_index_quals() will only pull out indexable
  conditions, and before 8.3 those were always strict.  So though we
  might have improperly generated null-extended rows in the outer
  join, they'd get discarded from the result anyway.  The gating
  factor that makes the failure visible is that 8.3 considers "col IS
  NULL" to be indexable.  Hence I'm not going to risk back-patching
  further than 8.3.

- If pnstrdup is going to be promoted to a generally available
  function, it ought to conform to the rest of palloc.h in using Size
  for sizes.

- In pgsql/src/backend/access/gin/ginbulk.c, remove unnecessary
  coziness of GIN code with datum copying.  Now that space is tracked
  via GetMemoryChunkSpace, there's really no advantage to duplicating
  datumCopy's innards here.  This is one bit of my toast indirection
  patch that should go in anyway.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Merge duplicate upper/lower/initcap() routines in oracle_compat.c
  and formatting.c to use common code;  remove duplicate functions and
  support routines that are no longer needed.

- Add TODO: "Consider whether duplicate keys should be sorted by
  block/offset."

- Add libpq comment about how to determine the format used for passing
  binary values.  Add comments to libpq C function for parameter
  passing.

- Add to TODO: "Implement a module capability for loading
  /contrib-style extensions."

- Add to TODO: "Allow custom variables to appear in pg_settings()."

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/backup.sgml, backup wording improvement.
  Joshua D. Drake.

- Add URL for Merge TODO.

- Add to TODO: "Allow COPY to report errors sooner."

- Mark TODO as done: "Prevent pg_dump/pg_restore from being affected
  by statement_timeout."

- Remove use of postmaster.opts.default by pg_ctl.

- Use SYSTEMQUOTE as concatentation to strings, rather than %s printf
  patterns, for clarity.

- Fix 'pg_ctl restart' to preserve command-line arguments.

- Add to TODO: "Improve LDAP authentication configuration options."

- Update FAQ URLs as suggested by Curtis Gallant.

- Simplify 'pg_ctl restart' detection of first argument in
  postmaster.opts.

- More FAQ URL updates from Curtis Gallant.

- Add TODO about security: "Improve server security options."

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_ctl/pg_ctl.c, fix pg_ctl bug where detection of
  binary location from postmaster.opts wasn't working.

- Add MERGE TODO URL.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/syntax.sgml, use SGML table to show backslash
  string escapes, rather than have them appear in a paragraph.  Andy
  Anderson.

- Fix 'pg_ctl reload' to properly preserve postmaster commend-line
  arguments on restart.  Patch to releases 8.0 - 8.3.X.

- Add to TODO: "Fix system views like pg_stat_all_tables to use
  set-returning functions, rather than views of per-column functions."

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, mention actual function names in
  documentation of how to pass binary values to libpq.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Synced parser for ecpg.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/formatting.c, fix bug "select
  lower('asd') = 'asd'" returns false with multibyte encoding and
  non-C locale. Fix is just to use correct source's length for
  char2wchar call.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/libpq/win32.mak, fix standalone libpq build
  on win32.  Hiroshi Saito.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

Raneyt AT cecs.pdx.edu's patch implementing XML output for EXPLAIN.
No documentation.

== Pending Patches ==

Heikki Linnakangas sent in another revision of his "relation forks"
patch and another that rewrites the FSM.

David Wheeler sent in two revisions of a patch to add a
case-insensitive text types to PostgreSQL.

Thomas Lee sent in two revisions of a patch to add a new GUC called
track_activity_query_size per discussion
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-06/msg00814.php

ITAGI Takahiro sent in two revisions of a patch to fix the
archive/restore docs for Windows.

ITAGI Takahiro sent in a patch to create an executore hook for logging
SQL statements.